ann17039 — Announcement

Planetarium News

4 July 2017

As the construction of the ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre here in Garching continues apace, ready for its opening in Spring 2018, ESO continues to make an unprecedented range of high-quality materials available for use in planetariums, produced by world-renowned astrophotographers, artists, technicians and musicians.

The latest additions to our collection include:

New 4k live fulldome webcams for ALMA and VLT, new deep-sky night-time cameras. These new webcams show many wonderful day- and night-time phenomena live from the observatories, such as zodiacal light, gegenschein, airglow, atmospheric absorption and diffraction.

More ESO fulldome clips, including stunning timelapses of ESO’s observatories, an artist’s impression of the TRAPPIST-1 system, and renderings of violent events in the Universe such as a black hole devouring a star and merging stars creating a supernova.

More beautiful image compositions for museums, images and videos for exhibition use in spectacular high resolution — up to 20 000 pixels wide. These will form part of the ESO Supernova Living Universe Exhibition.

VR movies: these 360 x 180-degree immersive-experience movies are a new product type that can be used with Virtual Reality (VR) glasses like Oculus Rift, HTC Vive or Google Cardboard. The first movies are:

The CLUES simulation in up to 16k x 8k format produced by the Adler Planetarium.

You can find a list of the previously added materials in our earlier announcement here, and in our collection on the ESO Supernova website.

We are confident that this collection will contribute to the continued success of the planetarium community which we at the ESO Supernova are so proud and excited to be a part of. If you in turn would like to help sustain the continued production of free resources for planetariums and to keep the ESO Supernova free you can: